How Should Teachers Be Prepared? RL on Student-Induced States for On-Policy Distillation
On-policy distillation (OPD) improves the reasoning capabilities of small language models through token-level teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories. Yet can teachers that excel at solving problems independently also guide student reasoning effectively? Prior work shows that when student prefixes follow reasoning paths that differ from the teacher's own or contain errors, teachers can be less accurate when continuing from these prefixes than when solving problems independently. To this end, we propose Prep-OPD, which uses reinforcement learning (RL) before distillation to train the teacher to adapt to the student's existing reasoning state and correct course when errors ari...
| Authors | Xiaoyu Ma, Haoyue Liu, Zhichao Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 4 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 October 2026 |
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